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Not long ago, I cared for a middle-aged man I’ll call Jim, who was generally healthy but had recently started to feel sluggish. One of his friends told him to try a hormone supplement. After Jim saw on social media that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Trump Administration’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, had endorsed supplements as a part of an “anti-aging” regimen, he ordered one from a telehealth company. A few months later, he noticed swelling and pain in his calf. ChatGPT warned him that he might have a blood clot. I met Jim for the first time in the emergency room. An ultrasound revealed a blockage in a leg vein, which could cause serious problems if it travelled to his lungs. He stopped the supplement and started a blood thinner.

What struck me about Jim’s case was that, until the moment he limped into the hospital where I work, his journey had taken place entirely outside of the traditional health-care system. He found a remedy through word of mouth; social media and the Make America Healthy Again movement lent credibility to it; and a direct-to-consumer company supplied it. A.I. diagnosed his blood clot—I only confirmed it. Jim hadn’t been seen by a doctor in years.

2025 in Review

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

For much of the past century, doctors had a near-monopoly on knowledge about and the provision of medical care. Patients had little choice but to turn to doctors, and doctors had little need to justify their gatekeeping role. But, today, many groups—A.I. startups, wellness influencers, longevity entrepreneurs, MAHA acolytes—are vying for medical authority, often by chipping away at that of doctors. In her best-selling book, “Good Energy,” Casey Means, Donald Trump’s nominee for Surgeon General, wrote that the most meaningful days of her life “came from ignoring a team of doctors,” who had recommended that her mother try aggressive end-of-life cancer care. Means, who trained as a surgeon before turning to alternative medicine, suggested that her mother’s doctors were biased by financial interests. In February, Bill Gates said on “The Tonight Show” that A.I. will make sophisticated medical advice—the kind that has been limited by the availability of skilled practitioners—costless and commonplace over the next decade. Humans, he said, will no longer be needed “for most things.” (The New Yorker’s parent company, Condé Nast, has partnerships with several A.I. companies, including OpenAI.)

As it is, a recent poll found that about half of young people believe that individuals who do their own research can know as much as a doctor. Nearly forty per cent say they’ve followed advice seen on social media instead of a medical provider’s—even though around half of the top hundred trending mental-health videos on TikTok contain misleading or inaccurate information, according to an investigation by the Guardian. In the U.S., nearly four in ten parents identify as supporters of the MAHA movement. Meanwhile, according to a Gallup survey, the trust Americans have in doctors has fallen fourteen points since 2021, and now sits at its lowest level in decades. In 2025, a doctor at a clinic is just one purveyor of health care in an increasingly competitive market.

Historically, medicine’s power rested on a specific kind of cultural authority—the ability to determine not only what diseases exist, who has them, and what to do about it, but also what counts as evidence or truth. In “The Social Transformation of American Medicine,” first published in 1983, the Princeton sociologist Paul Starr describes two pillars of professional authority: legitimacy and dependency. Legitimacy provides a basis for why people accept influence over their lives; dependency refers to the harm they’re likely to face if they don’t accept it. Starr argues that authority is, paradoxically, characterized by the power to compel or persuade—but it is undermined by the need to resort to either. If you have to talk people into believing that you’re right, it’s because they don’t think that you are.

Medicine is undergoing a kind of unbundling. Specialized services can now be accessed à la carte from many sources other than doctors—even if some are bad for our health. The upshot is that medicine can no longer take its cultural authority for granted. In today’s fractured and fractious health-care system, doctors must convince patients of the value of their expertise, and at times they must outcompete other kinds of providers. We may need to accept that we are no longer the high priests of health care. Perhaps, instead, it’s time to think of ourselves as what we have always been: healers.

The medical profession wasn’t always powerful. For decades after the nation’s founding, doctors had competition from homeopaths, herbalists, apothecaries, midwives, and religious healers—not to mention mothers. Some doctors worked second jobs. Benjamin Rush, a physician and a Founding Father, encouraged students at the country’s first medical school, the University of Pennsylvania, to cultivate a farm, so that they could eat even when business was bad. Otherwise, he told them, you might harbor “an impious wish for the prevalence of sickness in your neighbourhood.”

In the nineteenth century, doctors started to consolidate their authority by standardizing, and encouraging, medical education. Most states passed medical-licensing laws, although they were unevenly enforced. But during the populist era that followed the election of Andrew Jackson—one of Trump’s favorite Presidents—many states repealed licensing requirements altogether, amid a surge in suspicion of élites and expertise. Not until the twentieth century did medical schools, medical societies, and medical boards—three types of institutions that can buttress a profession—coalesce to give doctors a new level of influence.

Some of today’s challenges to medical authority, including political shifts and technological changes, began outside the medical field. But others seem like reactions to long-standing shortcomings. Tens of millions of Americans don’t have a primary-care doctor, and, in much of the country, wait times to see a physician reached new highs this year. More than half of U.S. counties don’t have a psychiatrist. Many people wish that their medical providers spent more time trying to understand them. Meanwhile, medical errors are estimated to harm hundreds of thousands of Americans each year.

The multibillion-dollar field of menopause care, which has historically been understudied and underfunded, hints at what’s happening to health care as a whole. There has been an explosion of investment: between 2019 and 2024, venture-capital funding for women’s health more than tripled, and women now have access to care that they previously didn’t have. But these funds are not necessarily flowing to medical professionals; in some cases, so-called menopause influencers are exploiting a “menopause Gold Rush.” “The slowly dawning realisation that these women might be slightly underserved . . . has unfortunately coincided with the high-water mark of aggressive capitalism,” the author Viv Groskop argued in the Guardian. The BBC journalist Kirsty Wark has warned that many women are promised relief from “debilitating symptoms if they buy specially branded supplements, teas, and even pyjamas.”

Worthwhile efforts to make medicine more convenient and accessible can sometimes lead to care that is diluted and extractive—partly because businesses can be untethered from the ethics that guide the medical profession. For many health-care startups, selling pills and products is tidier than the comprehensive forms of care offered at traditional medical practices; writing prescriptions is more scalable than building relationships. Last year, Cerebral, which called itself the fastest-growing mental-health company in history, agreed to pay millions of dollars in fines for overprescribing addictive A.D.H.D. medications. Last month, following a Wall Street Journal investigation, executives at the mental-health startup Done Global were found guilty of aggressively pushing Adderall. At the trial, one clinician testified that she was “just stamping” prescriptions without conducting follow-up patient visits. According to a former executive, the C.E.O. had encouraged employees to “bend laws” and told them, “Whoever is the first person to get arrested, I’ll buy you a Tesla.”

Technological fixes for medicine’s weaknesses carry similar possibilities and pitfalls. A.I. increasingly seems capable of solving complex medical cases; the United Kingdom has announced plans to roll out a “ChatGPT for the NHS,” intended to serve as a first point of contact for patients in need of primary care. In the U.S., the startup Doctronic offers free online visits with an A.I. clinician, with the option to see a human physician afterward—for a fee. Doctors have long been gatekeepers to medical technology, but now technology could serve as a gatekeeper to doctors.

Algorithmic health care comes with its own perils. Many people say that they’ve received incorrect medical advice from chatbots, and that it’s difficult for them to tell whether A.I.-generated health information is wrong. New research suggests that when chatbots are given false information they readily repeat and expand upon it. In a presentation to regulators, the head of the American Psychological Association warned that chatbots “masquerading” as therapists can be “antithetical” to responsible care. Several lawsuits allege that OpenAI’s models contributed to suicides among young people. (In one case, OpenAI denied the allegations in court filings.)

Earlier this year, a judge allowed a class-action lawsuit against UnitedHealthcare to move forward. According to the health-news site STAT, Medicare patients were forced out of rehabilitation facilities, or had to spend down their savings to remain in care, because an A.I. tool said they ought to have recovered by then. A subsidiary of the company reportedly set goals to closely align patients’ rehab stays with the A.I.’s output. (UnitedHealthcare denied the allegations, telling STAT that the tool wasn’t used to make coverage decisions.) One woman, Megan Bent, recounted the story of her father, who was in a rehab facility after surgery to remove a cancerous lesion from his brain. The A.I. tool said that he needed only a few weeks to recover; his neurosurgeon said three months. Bent won two appeals on behalf of her father, but, after a third, UnitedHealthcare said it would not cover his care. He went home with meningitis, returned to the hospital a few hours later, and died.

Starr, the Princeton sociologist, correctly predicted that corporatization would remake American health care, and that physicians would lose autonomy and authority. But what really surprised him, he told me recently, is the rise of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and what he called a “radical shift” in federal science policy. In 2025, according to the Times, the Trump Administration awarded grants to thousands fewer research projects than usual, which has affected virtually every aspect of medicine. This year, the Department of Health and Human Services purged thousands of employees and weakened government programs dedicated to tobacco control, environmental safety, injury prevention, and reproductive health. “This is part of an effort by one set of élites to use populist appeals to undermine another set of élites,” Starr told me. “I didn’t expect things to move this far, this fast.”

It’s not just money that’s being reallocated—it’s trust. When Trump tells pregnant women to “fight like hell” not to take Tylenol, citing a disputed link to autism, or when Kennedy remakes the country’s most important vaccine-advisory committee after suggesting that previous members were corrupt, they are signalling that doctors cannot be trusted as sources of truth. “The fact that MAHA is so parasitic on MAGA suggests that what’s happening in health is really a subset of a larger development,” Sophia Rosenfeld, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Democracy and Truth,” told me. “All of these bulwarks that have helped us organize the transmission of knowledge are in crisis.” According to a recent KFF-Washington Post poll, many parents aren’t sure whether Kennedy’s claims about vaccines are true, and about half lack confidence that federal health agencies can insure the safety of vaccines. When displacing existing sources of authority, uncertainty is a feature, not a bug.

The medical profession of the twentieth century was a hegemon; today, it is a regional power. When a hegemon loses status, it can take a few paths. It can aim for restoration—bringing back the empire—which in this case would probably focus on gatekeeping. It can retreat, which might mean abdicating medicine’s broad public role, perhaps in favor of a narrow focus on earnings and technical skills. The last—and, in my view, the best—path is reinvention. Doctors can remake their profession by embracing the multi-polar medical landscape they now inhabit, and by acting as a kind of system stabilizer: working with other powers to help shape rules, norms, and relationships. A superpower may act as though it can stand alone, but middle powers know the value of diplomacy and coalition-building.

Reinventing the medical profession will require greater engagement with the world outside of hospitals and clinics. Many physicians are taking to social media; a cadre of “TikTok Docs” have amassed millions of followers with accessible and engaging videos. A growing number of doctors seem interested in leading health-care companies themselves or in running for office; in February, an advocacy organization set out to try to get a hundred physicians elected by 2030. Diplomacy also requires a willingness to stand in opposition to others. This year, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and other medical organizations issued recommendations that conflicted with those of the federal government. A few weeks ago, a dozen former F.D.A. officials, all of them physicians, wrote that they were “deeply concerned” about “the latest in a series of troubling changes”: the agency planned to make the approval of new vaccines more difficult. Such a move, they wrote, “could diminish both the FDA’s strength and Americans’ health and safety.”

Medical school is a place not only for technical instruction but also for moral formation; becoming a doctor means adopting a way of thinking and also a way of behaving. “The thing that unites Hippocrates, and nineteenth-century physicians, and physicians today, is the thing that we’re trying to do: help people feel better,” Richard Baron, an internist and geriatrician who until recently led the American Board of Internal Medicine, told me. “How we do it changes all the time. What we do never does.” That is not to say that doctors never err—they do, sometimes egregiously—but a thriving profession will set norms, correct itself, and defend against unrestrained commercialization and exploitation. Even today, in a moment of pitched cynicism, the public seems to appreciate this. Americans of all backgrounds and politics still overwhelmingly trust their own doctors.

In recent years, as alternative sources of medical authority have proliferated, some doctors have grown frustrated with how their jobs have changed. Pediatricians spend more time persuading parents to get children vaccinated; oncologists counsel patients when full-body MRIs, which are not usually recommended by doctors, raise false alarms. Sometimes I’m irritated that I have to steer someone away from a trending procedure, or convince them that they need an antibiotic. Doctors tend to see these conversations as distractions—a detour from “real medicine.” But we ought to understand them as increasingly important and, indeed, central to our jobs. Today, the doctor’s perspective must replace the doctor’s orders.

When I met Jim, my first inclination was to lecture him about the risks of supplements, and I caught myself adopting an I-told-you-so tone that often characterizes health communication. As he relayed his story, though, I grew more curious than critical. In spite of myself, I started to employ the most basic skill in medicine, and, possibly, in human interaction: I tried to look at things from his perspective. If I were in his position, I told him, I might have done what he did. During the visit, I also noticed that his blood-sugar level was elevated, a potential sign of diabetes. Reassuringly, he agreed to see a doctor. He even asked if I’d care for him. (Alas, I only see hospitalized patients.) In a world of distributed authority, a doctor’s every conversation is a chance to help patients see the value of science and medicine in their lives.

This year, I’ve found myself considering an aphorism I first heard in medical school: cure sometimes, relieve often, comfort always. The phrase is sometimes attributed to Hippocrates, but probably comes from Edward Livingston Trudeau, a physician who founded a nineteenth-century tuberculosis sanitarium in upstate New York, when antibiotics did not exist. As medicine has grown more powerful, it has focussed increasingly on cures over comfort. But it doesn’t have to be this way. “Medicine isn’t getting its old status back,” Baron said. “And why should the average person care about whether doctors have a privileged position, anyway? What they care about is: Who is going to help me when I need help?”

Recently, I spoke with an older woman I’ll call Margaret, who for decades had struggled with alcohol and often thought about quitting. About a year ago, her primary-care doctor helped her get treatment. “She was the one who really called me out,” Margaret said. One evening, she started experiencing symptoms of alcohol withdrawal—anxiety, tremors, a racing heart rate—and messaged her doctor, who responded immediately. “She said, I’m here for you. I’ll meet you at the E.R. if you want to come in.” Margaret decided to stay home, and the doctor spent much of the evening checking in. “She’s the reason I got through that initial withdrawal,” Margaret told me. “She’s the reason I’m sober.” Margaret’s doctor knew what Margaret needed, showed up when it mattered, and shepherded her through the most difficult moments. That’s what people have always wanted from their doctors. It’s what they always will. ♦

Looking back over the columns I’ve written in 2025, I can see that a lot of them, broadly construed, have been about reclaiming one’s mind. I wrote about living in the present, picturing the future, and exploring one’s memories; about reading, learning, and making the most of one’s spare time; and about whether artificial intelligence will end up expanding our thinking or limiting it. The shared subject was resistance to the forces, malevolent or inertial, that can render us mentally exhausted and scattered. I’m guessing I’m not the only person who thinks their mind needs to be reclaimed; for that reason, there’s no need to get into what it needs reclaiming from. We all have our own stories of attentional woe. Suffice it to say that, like many people, I’ve been on what seems a years-long quest to establish a greater degree of mental sovereignty.

We live in a heavily technologized culture, and so it’s natural to pursue mental reclamation through digital purification. Like my colleague Jay Caspian Kang, I quit looking at almost all social media this year. (It was getting wrecked by A.I., anyway.) I considered replacing my smartphone with a dumbphone—a device with little or no internet connectivity—but instead hobbled it using various apps and devices. I largely replaced my laptop with an e-ink tablet, made by the Norwegian company reMarkable; it has no browser or e-mail, but lets me write and annotate with both a keyboard and a stylus. (Most of my columns now start life in longhand.) And, at home, I moved my computer out of my main workspace and into a separate room. Now, if I want to go online, I have to walk there.

I like gadgets, and so, at times, my digital detox has verged on technophilic decadence. A few months ago, I bought a cheap-but-fun MP3 player, loaded it with a few dozen albums, and began listening to them on rotation; I figured this was better than grazing on endless Apple Music. Although I’ve blocked most of my smartphone apps, I still use A.I., not for companionship but for projects: recently, I’ve been having chatbots teach me about music production, so that I can make songs in GarageBand (on the computer in the other room) and listen to them on my MP3 player. All of which is to say that cultivating a healthy, creative digital life can easily become an absorbing pursuit unto itself. It’s a little like setting out to clean your house, and then growing interested in interior design. You might start re-cluttering your house with new, tasteful objects.

The bad distractions are mostly gone. The question is, Now what? At least in my case, taming technology hasn’t led directly to a reclaimed mind.

I turned forty-six this year, and, apart from being underslept, I have no midlife complaints. I have a loving family, a rewarding job, fitness, energy, and more. But my mind feels a little . . . something. (Vague? Inflexible? Out of shape?) In my interior world, I’ve noticed a growing tendency toward stasis, which digital distractions may have helped me ignore. Year by year, life’s demands have built and ramified, and I’ve focussed more and more on being efficient. I’ve increasingly found contentment in moving quickly from A to B to C. I suspect that I’ve become trapped in the amber of my previous thoughts.

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind,” Virginia Woolf wrote, in “A Room of One’s Own.” On the other hand, sometimes we’re our own jailers. In “Modern Fiction,” Woolf asked readers to consider “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.” Such a mind “receives a myriad of impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel,” and together these form “a luminous halo”—life, basically, in all its strangeness and mystery. A writer who could “base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention” might stretch himself to describe that life. But most, Woolf observed, simply went along with “the accepted style.” They’d internalized conventions, rules, habits, and ideas, restraining their own minds.

Modernists like Woolf developed an attitude, which T. S. Eliot called “impersonality,” meant to reclaim their mental lives from the habits they unknowingly followed. The philosopher Raymond Geuss has a story that captures the idea nicely. Geuss recalls a mentor—a school teacher of his—dispensing advice about becoming a visual artist. “Set aside half an hour or forty-five minutes a day,” the mentor said, and then draw, while ignoring “all the exercises and principles and things one might have learned.” Afterward, instead of judging your drawing, look at it and say to yourself, “So, this is what-I-do-on-a-day-like-this.” That’s not unlike observing how a river looks after a heavy rain, Geuss explains. You might say, That’s how the Hudson looks on a rainy day. And you might notice that this is the kind of drawing you make when you’re sad, or elated, or apprehensive, or when money’s tight, or when you’ve just played with your kids, called your mom, gone for a run, or watched “One Battle After Another.”

Impersonality is one of those big ideas that scholars can elucidate forever. It sounds abstract, but on some level it has a simple meaning: seeing yourself less as a fixed point and more as a container. In her book “Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World,” the writer Anne-Laure Le Cunff identifies “the self-consistency fallacy” as “the assumption that ‘I have always acted in a certain way; therefore, I must continue to act in this way.’ ” She suggests making adventurous “pacts” with yourself and seeing where they lead. You’re not a musician, but you can still decide to write a song every week for six weeks; you’re not a poet, but you can still try writing a poem every day for ten days; you’ve never started a business, but you can still sell something on Etsy. Maybe it will turn out that, actually, you “are” a musician, writer, or entrepreneur. But why focus on what you “are”? It might be enough to find that, for a few minutes here and there, your mind can contain music, poetry, and ambition. Something new can happen in that quiet room.

Truman Capote titled his first novel “Other Voices, Other Rooms.” The book is about a teen-age boy who, after a family tragedy, goes to live in a faraway house with relatives he hardly knows. The title evokes the discovery, in adolescence, that the world is full of strangers with their own concerns; the knowledge that life is full of secret stories and languages; and the understanding that, in society, the voices we know would be drowned out if we could hear the ones that go unheard. It also captures a sense of possible transformation. Of his protagonist, Capote writes, “A flower was blooming inside him, and soon, when all tight leaves unfurled, when the noon of youth burned whitest, he would turn and look, as others had, for the opening of another door.”

If, like me, you’re decades past adolescence, it can be hard to remember the scary thrill of hearing other voices in other rooms. You may no longer want to hear them: there’s something to be said for laying down rugs, hanging curtains, and listening intently to what’s happening in the specific room you happen to inhabit. Still, feeling a little too well insulated, I’ve had my ear to the wall. I’ve been eavesdropping on my friend J., who’s taught himself a new art form, and on W., a musician I know whose unself-conscious, intuitive creativity I’ve long admired, among others. Psychologists and guidance counsellors talk about role models, but that’s not quite what I’m after. In an essay called “The Good of Friendship,” from 2010, the philosopher Alexander Nehamas notes that our friends don’t necessarily act in ways that inspire us; in fact, hanging out with them often involves activities that are “trivial, commonplace, and boring.” Nevertheless, our friendships offer us “opportunities to try different ways of being.” That’s closer.

What does it really mean to be in charge of your own mind? In many aspects of life, it’s easier to say what we don’t want than it is to say what we do. We don’t want to be screen-addled, apocalypse-minded nervous wrecks, incapable of reading for more than a quarter-hour at a time—fair enough. But who do we want to be? Maybe we just want to be people for whom that’s a live question. Reclaiming your mind might come down to reasserting your right to wonder what it’s for. ♦

Josh Safdie’s hectic new film “Marty Supreme,” set in 1952, mainly in New York, is, essentially, “Uncut Gems” but with a happy ending. That recklessly exuberant 2019 drama, which Safdie co-directed with his brother, Benny, stars Adam Sandler as a jewelry dealer in Manhattan and a compulsive gambler who takes thrilling risks to pay off his creditors and learns that the house always wins. With “Marty Supreme”—Safdie’s first feature directed without Benny since 2008—the happy ending follows logically from a happy beginning, so to speak. The film’s first scene features a tryst, in a back room of a shoe store, between the protagonist, a twenty-three-year-old salesman named Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), and a young married woman named Rachel (Odessa A’zion).

But Marty’s greater happiness involves another secret, one that he’s scheming to spring on the world: that he, a Ping-Pong hustler who plays locally for modest stakes, is about to prove, in an international table-tennis tournament in London, that he’s the best in the world. For a scuffling guy from the Lower East Side, it’s a tall order; nonetheless, with his irrepressible energy and his wiles, he gets out of his low-rent neighborhood and into ever-wilder exploits that, in the story’s eight-month span, fling him about and leave him changed—perhaps even for the better.

Marty’s chutzpah is justified by history; the character is loosely based on the table-tennis hustler and champion Marty Reisman, who died in 2012, at the age of eighty-two. Like Marty, Reisman came from the Lower East Side and travelled overseas in 1952 for an international tournament. Other details, freely tweaked, mesh, too, but the main similarities are in temperament—a megawatt personality and a penchant for braggadocio.

Unlike Sandler’s gambler in “Uncut Gems,” Marty bets on no one but himself. It isn’t easy for Marty, who lives with his emotionally and financially dependent mother (Fran Drescher), to fund the trip to London: it takes ruses and threats and some outmaneuvering of his boss, his doting but tough uncle Murray (the writer Larry Sloman). So, once Marty gets there, he has to make the most of it. He finds the competition stiffer than he expected—especially from a Japanese player (the real-life table-tennis star Koto Kawaguchi), who uses a new kind of paddle and grip. But what matters even more than winning any one match is to get into the spotlight and into the higher echelons of society, since, to launch an international career, Marty needs rich backers—and, in any case, he craves fame and the trappings of success. Bulldozing his way into a suite at the Ritz, Marty focusses his impudent charm on a glamorous former movie star, Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), and also ingratiates himself with her husband, a wealthy businessman named Milton Rockwell (the entrepreneur, politician, and “Shark Tank” judge Kevin O’Leary) with an eye for publicity and, as he says, a nose for bullshit.

While there, Marty also partners with a Hungarian former champion, who survived Auschwitz (Géza Röhrig, who played an Auschwitz inmate in “Son of Saul”), in a table-tennis stunt duo. His relationship with Rachel, who works at a pet shop and has a lumpish husband, Ira (Emory Cohen), tightens—or, rather, she tightens it, with a ruse of her own. Then Marty faces a quandary, akin to the money emergency that screeches like a siren through “Uncut Gems”: hit with a fine by the table-tennis commissioner (the writer Pico Iyer) for boorish behavior in London, and left with little time to pay it off in order to enter a tournament in Tokyo, he starts Ping-Pong hustling again, in the company of a cabdriver friend named Wally (the rapper Tyler, the Creator). The result is a whirlwind of chaos that involves such out-of-control elements as a gangster (the filmmaker Abel Ferrara), a dog, a car crash, a break-in, a shoot-out, a fire, a flood, another affair, and a display of public defiance so brazen that it risks becoming an international incident.

Safdie delivers this bustling, hyperkinetic story with a hyperspeed aesthetic: whizzing and whipping camerawork (overseen by the cinematographer, Darius Khondji) that presses very close to the actors and exaggerates their frenzied motion, clattering high-velocity dialogue that seems pounded onto the screen with hammer and die, characters expressing themselves with impulsive gestures, editing that slashes away any moments of repose, a script that’s filled with hairpin reversals of fortune. With its breathless pace, “Marty Supreme” favors a style of acting that’s far less dependent on technique to construct scenes than on personality and presence to create moments—which explains the film’s zesty mix of professional actors with notables from other fields of endeavor. It’s a practice that the Safdies relied on in their previous features, but never as extensively or as effectively. The drama built into the casting of “Marty Supreme” reaches its apex when, playing the tycoon Rockwell, whom Marty beseeches at a crucial time of need, O’Leary utters the word “power” with hardened authority.

Nonetheless, “Marty Supreme” is Chalamet’s show, and he dominates it, incarnating Marty’s callow enthusiasm while also lending it an edge. Marty is a born performer; the hustle itself is a performance that depends on an elaborate pretense of playing badly, which he persuasively amplifies with a show of whiny kvetching. His shameless publicity-seeking involves wheedling, bragging, blustering, or just plain lying with a straight face that could put professional actors to shame—and indeed does, when he pursues Kay (who’s attempting a comeback) into a rehearsal and upstages her co-star. Chalamet embodies Marty’s arrant showmanship with an evident joy in performance, exactly as Marty himself schemes not only shamelessly but jubilantly. And his energy is contagious—A’zion and Paltrow tussle with him at the same level of electrifying intensity.

Though “Marty Supreme” is Safdie’s sixth fiction feature, it’s only the second that he has directed solo. (The first, “The Pleasure of Being Robbed,” from 2008, which he completed at the age of twenty-three, also features a Ping-Pong hustle of sorts.) He co-directed the four in between—“Daddy Longlegs,” “Heaven Knows What,” “Good Time,” and “Uncut Gems”—with Benny, whose first solo feature, “The Smashing Machine,” an appealing but mild bio-pic of the mixed-martial-arts fighter Mark Kerr, was released earlier this year. Judging from the brothers’ new solo features, it’s Benny who has been the voice of logic in their collaborations, Josh the engine of fury. Benny’s absence is detectable in a few omissions, especially in scenes of mayhem and their aftermath which never get the attention of the police. Also, with his emphasis on Marty’s audacious escapades, Safdie never gets into Marty’s head—or into his body. The movie offers little in the way of athletic subjectivity, of his feel for the game or his competitive strategies.

Still, Josh appears to have come out ahead in their separation, because, in “Marty Supreme,” he remained in partnership with Ronald Bronstein, who is, in effect, the third Safdie brother—a co-writer and co-editor of all four of the brothers’ joint movies, and the star of their quasi-autobiographical “Daddy Longlegs,” playing a version of the brothers’ father.

Bronstein is one of the hidden heroes of the modern cinema. He has directed only one feature to date, “Frownland,” which premièred in 2007; it’s the story of a troubled young Brooklynite whose soul is shredded by the cruelty and coldness he endures at work, at home, and in love, and its hallucinatory turbulence opened vistas for a new generation of harsh, high-strung, and uninhibitedly inventive independent movies, such as those of the Safdies, Alex Ross Perry (whose “Pavements” was a highlight of this year), Amy Seimetz (“Sun Don’t Shine”), and his wife, Mary Bronstein (whose 2008 feature “Yeast” is a high point of Greta Gerwig’s acting career and whose new one, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” is among the most acclaimed movies of 2025). The Bronstein cinematic DNA even extends to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” in which a key role is played by Paul Grimstad, a musician and professor with only one prior acting credit—for a major role in “Frownland.” (He also has a bit part in “Marty Supreme.”)

Though “Marty Supreme” is based (albeit loosely) on the true story of someone else’s life, it’s Safdie’s most personal film to date. It’s one of the very few movies that dramatize—hyperbolically, comedically, even mockingly, yet optimistically—the boldness unto folly of a young fanatic turning ambition into reality. I’m not, of course, suggesting that Safdie or Bronstein has ever done anything Marty-like—lied, cheated, threatened, insulted, seduced, betrayed, stolen, clobbered, been clobbered, or endangered others in pursuit of their art—but that, in imagining Marty, they’ve successfully extrapolated from the mind-bending extremes of energy and will that the movie life demands. Safdie, like Marty, bet on himself, starting with D.I.Y. filmmaking, and advancing through a decade-plus of critically acclaimed movies on the industry’s periphery. Now, with “Marty Supreme,” he’s in reach of the brass ring, even as he self-deprecatingly admits what it feels like to have fought his way there. ♦

Jim Jarmusch, one of the heroes of American independent filmmaking, is a longtime specialist in the tenuous relationships of free agents. With his new film, “Father Mother Sister Brother” (opening Dec. 24 at Film Forum and Film at Lincoln Center), he turns his attention to family bonds and finds them to be similarly uncertain—and perhaps all the more dubious owing to the pretense of their firmness. What’s more, he makes his case ambitiously and inventively, by way of a three-part feature showing three families in different countries facing wildly disparate circumstances.

Cate Blanchett in “Father Mother Sister Brother.”Photograph by Yorick Le Saux / Courtesy © Vague Notion 2024

The first part, set in rural New Jersey, brings two siblings, Emily (Mayim Bialik) and Jeff (Adam Driver), on a mission of mercy to their father (Tom Waits), a solitary eccentric whose lifelong financial irresponsibility sparks Emily’s anger and Jeff’s solicitude. In the second, a successful author (Charlotte Rampling) living in Dublin receives her annual visit from her daughters, one a rigid bureaucrat (Cate Blanchett) and the other a scuffling bohemian (Vicky Krieps). The last and most expansive episode, set in Paris and filled with alluring street scenes, features the fraternal twins Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat), who reconvene there upon their parents’ accidental deaths. As the twins revisit the family’s apartment and contemplate their memorabilia, they also rediscover their parents’ free-spirited legacy, and reconnect with each other.

Despite the drastic differences between the three families, Jarmusch emphasizes their similarities by way of drolly idiosyncratic echoes and recurrences—all three pay unusual attention to water and to watches, and all three use the term “Nowheresville” and the old-fashioned catchphrase “Bob’s your uncle.” “Father Mother Sister Brother” is an unusually plainspoken entry in the Jarmusch cinematic universe—it’s neither as minimalistically stylized as “Paterson” nor as decoratively wild as “The Dead Don’t Die”; rather, it’s principally a textual experiment that suggests, even quasi-scientifically, the underlying universality of families amid their aesthetic differences. Yet, between its melancholy view of disconnection and incomprehension, it offers a hint of ironic optimism about what a family’s future depends on—namely, its past.—Richard Brody

When the French choreographer Hervé Koubi discovered his hidden heritage, he took the common step of visiting the country of his roots: Algeria. His next move was much less ordinary: creating a piece with street dancers from the area. That 2013 work, “What the Day Owes to Night,” is a mesmerizing poetic vision. Bare-chested men in culottes drift, tumble, and spin—on their feet, like dervishes, and on their heads, like b-boys. They hurl one another through the air at trampoline heights. This breakthrough piece introduced a mode that Koubi has repeated in subsequent works with somewhat diminishing returns. Now the original blows back into town, performed by his Compagnie Hervé Koubi.—Brian Seibert (Joyce Theatre; Jan. 6-11.)

In the late nineties, the brothers Terrence and Gene Thornton, who rapped as Pusha T and Malice, surfaced from Virginia Beach as the coke-rap auteurs Clipse, under the stewardship of the Neptunes production team. In 2010, the duo separated, going opposite directions; Malice sought repentance through the church while Pusha became a hatchet man for Kanye West. This year, Clipse made its triumphant return after a sixteen-year hiatus with “Let God Sort Em Out,” a legacy work now nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammys. The LP is such a milestone that even some of the group’s competitors for the honor—Kendrick Lamar, Tyler, the Creator—contribute reverential verses. The album, which is also a reunion with Pharrell, feels as nostalgic as a homecoming, as the siblings assess a history of drug trafficking with clear eyes.—Sheldon Pearce (Brooklyn Paramount; Dec. 30.)

“Autorretrato, México” (“Self-Portrait, Mexico”), from 1989.Photograph by Graciela Iturbide / Courtesy Fundación MAPFRE

Graciela Iturbide’s tranquil images court the uncanny without fear or shame. It’s a daring but understated mirth that leads the photographer to the rough edges of the world. There, she captures—for example—a goat awaiting slaughter, a woman in a bridal gown donning a skeleton mask, a smiling child holding a rooster by its wings. The images in her show “Serious Play” are largely focussed on her home country, Mexico. Her camera finds its way through the naked, strange beauty of a masquerade procession in the street; across the desert skies, where she lands on the elegant stillness of a lone cactus; to forgotten corners where all manner of things are left behind—prosthetic legs or severed hooves or the simple flicker of a shadow—and then renewed, turned inside out by the lens.—Zoë Hopkins (International Center of Photography; through Jan. 12.)

In Anne Kauffman’s pristine Broadway revival of Jordan Harrison’s sci-fi drama “Marjorie Prime,” from 2014, the increasingly forgetful Marjorie (a luminous, ninety-six-year-old June Squibb) interacts with a so-called Prime, a hyper-realistic re-creation of her long-dead husband, Walter (Christopher Lowell). The Prime helpfully regurgitates Marjorie’s own life stories, though her daughter Tess (Cynthia Nixon) and son-in-law Jon (Danny Burstein) don’t agree about how truthful this pseudo-Walter should be. Technology has caught up to Harrison’s invention—generative-A.I. companies are already selling you a version of your much-missed grandma. Since Harrison uses silences, abbreviated scenes, and long pauses to suggest loss, he leaves us plenty of time to think . . . and to register the crawling horror under the poignant narrative before us.—Helen Shaw (Reviewed in our issue of 12/22/25.) (Hayes; through Feb. 15.)

Dee Dee Bridgewater and Bill Charlap.Photograph by Evelyn Freja

A stroke of inspiration led the boundary-pushing vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater to pair up with the impressionist pianist Bill Charlap. Though both are distinguished Grammy-winning jazz greats—the former, an N.E.A. Jazz Master, the latter, a renowned trio leader who has played with Barbra Streisand, Cécile McLorin Salvant, and Tony Bennett—they might not seem like a natural match. But Bridgewater saw a potential kinship, and, in June, after a few shows testing its chemistry, the duo released “Elemental,” a collaborative album spanning the catalogues of Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, Fats Waller, and more. The music is charming and jaunty, its looseness and zest owed to an alchemical balance between these two performers.—S. P. (Birdland; Jan. 6-10.)

Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson bring joyful energy to “Song Sung Blue,” the director Craig Brewer’s perky yet maudlin musical melodrama about the real-life professional and romantic partnership of Mike Sardina and Claire Stengl, who formed a Neil Diamond tribute act, called Lightning and Thunder, in Milwaukee. Mike, a mechanic, and Claire, a hairdresser, struggle in the local musical scene until a chance backstage encounter sparks Claire’s inspired recognition of Mike’s resemblance to Diamond. Their rehearsals lead to love, and these warm and vigorous scenes are the best in the film. The script, following their career’s ups (opening for Pearl Jam) and downs (a gig at a biker bar) is merely methodical; Hudson’s stage presence and tangy accent steal the show.—Richard Brody (Opening Dec. 25.)

Illustration by Jiyung Lee

December, typically, is a month of excess: too much spending, too much eggnog. But, according to a recent study, Americans are drinking less alcohol now than they have in thirty years; weekly drinks per capita have not been this low since 1995. There are many possible reasons for this shift—increased health consciousness, changing socialization patterns among young people, the rise of legal cannabis—but, whatever the cause, the libations market is now exploding with intriguing boozeless beverages. There have never been so many ways to feel festive without risking a hangover (or a holiday-party faux pas). It used to be, if you wanted to pop a bottle of something sparkly and sober-friendly, your only choice was Martinelli’s sparkling cider. But now, there are options galore. One corner of the non-alcoholic drink world that is truly booming is that of elegant champagne alternatives. French Bloom, a brand of alcohol-free sparkling wine launched in 2019 by friends Maggie Frerejean-Taittinger and Constance Jablonski, received a major investment from LVMH in 2024 and has been steadily growing as the fashion set’s favorite imitation brut (a bottle of their signature Le Blanc costs $39). Les Marées, from the South of France, makes its cheery bottles of N.A. Blanc des Blancs ($22) from organic French Chardonnay grapes, while Misty Cliffs sources its de-alcoholized sparkling brut ($26) from South African vineyards. If you are looking for cans, the Oregon-based brand Union Wine Co. recently released its new N.A. Underwood sparkling rosé, which comes in a four-pack for $28. Don’t let this year fizzle without a little fizz.

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• Because the kids are playing poker
• Keeping it old school
• Kindling for conversation

Many times in the past decade, Donald Trump’s public addresses have reminded me of old TV commercials for the electronics chain Crazy Eddie that I used to watch as a kid in suburban New Jersey—the rat-a-tat delivery, the breathless hype, the memorably absurdist slogans. (“His prices are INSAAAANE!”) But somehow this was never more the case than on Wednesday night, when the President spoke to the nation from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House, flanked by the soft glow of two Christmas trees and a portrait of George Washington.

The comparison isn’t exact, to be fair. Crazy Eddie’s legendary pitchman, Jerry Carroll, actually dressed up as Santa Claus for the chain’s famous holiday ads, for which Crazy Eddie presumably had to pay. Trump, in contrast, got free airtime from all of America’s major television networks for his Christmas commercial, which was delivered in the form of an eighteen-minute-and-thirty-three-second run-on sentence. That’s an awful lot of words to string together without much in the way of periods or common sense, though, by now, we all know there’s only one form of punctuation that Trump has truly embraced: the exclamation point. “I am bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast!” he declared on Wednesday night. “Boy, are we making progress!” “There’s never been anything like it!”

The centerpiece of the President’s speech was his announcement of a no-strings-attached deal for 1.4 million members of the U.S. military to receive year-end bonus checks of $1,776 each, in honor of next year’s celebration of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. “And the checks,” he said, “are already on the way!” More financial presents were promised by Santa Trump in the New Year: a great new housing policy, a great new health-care plan. As the President put it, “You the people are going to be getting great health care at a lower cost!” I, for one, can’t wait, having recently received a three-dollar-and-eighty-six-cent reimbursement check from our health-insurance company for my son’s thousand-dollar-plus annual checkup.

If only Trump were actually selling discount electronics. Suffice it to say, there were never any examples of Crazy Eddie trying to sell new color televisions by claiming that Somali immigrants stole the old ones. When the website Defense One revealed overnight that the money for Trump’s so-called warrior dividend was being diverted from a $2.9-billion fund for military housing allowances set up by Congress, it was not so much surprising as predictable. Santa has to get the money for all those presents from somewhere, right?

But, as an advertisement for Trump’s year-end accomplishments, the speech had a whiff of desperation about it. Can it be that the Presidential huckster, with his approval ratings sunk down in the thirties, secretly knows that America isn’t buying what he’s selling? Why else was he talking so fast? A few hours before the speech, even a few Republicans on Capitol Hill had started to rebel, demanding a floor vote to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies that are about to expire, which would send health-care prices skyrocketing for millions of people. In his address, Trump made no mention of this, instead blaming the coming price increases on Democrats, though they have spent the past few months fighting Trump to prevent them. That level of gaslighting, it seems, can take a lot out of a man. When his speech was over, according to a White House pool report, Trump turned to the press and said, “You think that’s easy?” then took a swig of Diet Coke. The sense that he was just going through the motions was only reinforced by what came next: “Susie told me I have to give an address to the nation,” he said, or, per the pool report, something closely approximating it.

Susie, of course, is Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, and part of the point of Trump’s comment was no doubt to remind the reporters that she is still calling the shots in his White House. Wiles, who is famously low-profile, found herself facing a rare bout of bad publicity this week, when her lacerating comments about the President and much of his inner circle to the author Chris Whipple, in eleven taped interviews in the course of the past year, were published in Vanity Fair.

Among the choicest bits: Wiles said that Trump, like her father, the late football commentator Pat Summerall, “has an alcoholic’s personality,” that Vice-President J. D. Vance has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” and that Elon Musk was a drug-microdosing “odd, odd duck.” She also revealed herself to be a doubter when it came to many of the most famous outrages of Trump’s return to office, questioning everything from Musk’s destruction of the United States Agency for International Development—“no rational person” could be in favor of how it was handled, she told Whipple—to the Presidential pardons for violent pro-Trump rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Much of the news value came from the sheer novelty of a senior official in Trump’s reality-defying second term stating the obvious. On first read, it was sort of a relief to know that not everyone in that gilded asylum on Pennsylvania Avenue is deluded enough to believe the fairy tales they concoct for public consumption. But Wiles is no hero. In Trump’s first term, the kinds of officials who occasionally betrayed an uncomfortable attachment to the facts tended to be the ones who, it later emerged, were secretly pushing back against some of Trump’s excesses. I’m thinking of John Kelly, Trump’s first-term chief of staff who secretly consulted a book about his boss’s pathological narcissism and came to loathe Trump so much that, on the eve of the 2024 election, he called him a textbook “fascist.”

Read Whipple’s account more closely, and it’s clear that’s not what’s happening here. Wiles insisted to Whipple that she was neither an “enabler” nor a “bitch,” but what leaps out is how unwilling she has been to act on any of her bluntly spoken observations. In a choice between Trump and the truth, she would pick the President every time. In the many laudatory stories that have been written about her during the past few disruptive months, Wiles is often depicted as the strongest of Trump’s five White House chiefs. But the portrait that emerges in Whipple’s interviews is one of weakness—if Musk was so crazy, and Trump was so wrong about so many things, then how come it wasn’t her job to do something about it, for reasons of political self-interest, if not basic human decency?

One of the most revealing details in Whipple’s article is about Wiles’s West Wing office, in which she keeps a freestanding video screen next to the fireplace, with a live feed of Trump’s social-media posts. Was she sitting in there, watching the screen when Trump posted on Monday morning about the death of the Hollywood filmmaker Rob Reiner, blaming his gruesome murder on his liberal politics and “TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME”? Was she there when, a few weeks ago, he called for the death by hanging of members of Congress who dared to remind U.S. military personnel that they do not have to follow illegal orders? Does she bother to speak up when he demands outrageous acts of tribute, such as renaming the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after himself? Or when he continues his vengeful campaign of politicized prosecutions that she claims to have told him to stop after his first few months in office?The point is that it’s Trump’s unreality that governs Susie Wiles now; whatever her vestigial connection to the truth, it’s the President’s truth-challenged world whose trains she has tasked herself with making run on time.

Which brings me back to Wednesday night’s Presidential address. When Trump was done speaking, the press pool observed the handful of staffers who had gathered in the room, praising him for a “great” and “really good” job. Wiles, for her part, remarked not on what he had said but on the fact that he had stuck to the timetable. “I told you twenty minutes, and you were twenty minutes on the dot,” she told him. If what he says is wildly untruthful, enraging to millions of his fellow-citizens, or just outright bizarre, what does she care? It’s not her fault if he can’t close the sale. “I don’t think there’s anybody in the world right now that could do the job that she’s doing,” Whipple quoted Marco Rubio as saying of Wiles. And maybe he was right. ♦

This April, in a speech given at the Shanghai branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the physicist Xu Hongjie announced a breakthrough. For over a decade, his team had been working on an experimental nuclear reactor that runs on a lava-hot solution of fissile material and molten salt, rather than on solid fuel. The reactor, which went online two years ago, was a feat in itself. It is still the only one of its kind in operation in the world, and has the potential to be both safer and more efficient than the water-cooled nuclear plants that dominate the industry. Now, Xu explained, his team had been able to refuel the reactor without shutting it down, demonstrating a level of mastery over their new system.

As dazzling as that was, the timing of Xu’s speech also freighted the topic with geopolitical import. Only a few months earlier, DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial-intelligence company, had set alarms ringing through the U.S. tech world when it became clear that the relatively small Chinese startup, operating under U.S. export controls, had created a large language model that rivalled anything devised by the behemoths of Silicon Valley. Xu cast his team’s molten-salt reactor in the same light: yet another sign that the technology gap between China and the U.S. had closed.

Xu explained that his team had based their design on an experimental reactor that had been built in Tennessee in the nineteen-sixties. Known as the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, or the M.S.R.E., that project hit a dead end in the early seventies, when it lost federal funding. Xu’s team had learned everything they could about the M.S.R.E. so that, decades later, they could bring the project back to life. Xu compared their labors to the story of the tortoise and the hare: whereas the United States had “gotten lazy and made a mistake,” China had seized the “chance to overtake” it.

In reality, China’s molten-salt reactor was less the product of a race than a collaboration. Less than ten years earlier, Xu’s team had been working with an array of American nuclear scientists. M.I.T. had irradiated graphite samples for the Chinese scientists. Nuclear engineers from Berkeley flew to Shanghai to review the original design. And by 2015, at what was perhaps the peak of U.S.-China amity in the sciences, Xu’s home institution, the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, or SINAP, had signed a coöperative research-and-development agreement with Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the site of the world’s first molten-salt reactor.

These agreements could be seen as products of Reagan-era neoliberalism. They allow national labs to hire out their facilities and staff to outside entities that, in exchange for funding, can secure a proprietary claim to any technologies U.S. national labs discover while working on the designated project. For the most part, this has facilitated technology transfer from public institutions to the private sector. But the agreement between O.R.N.L. and SINAP created an unprecedented situation: a Chinese state-owned lab was paying an American lab millions of dollars to develop materials and plumbing for molten-salt reactors.

From the start, the American side operated under the belief that the Chinese would be the first to build a thorium reactor. China was spending the money to do it, after all. There was some funding for molten-salt research in America, but much less than was needed, and this was why the Oak Ridge researchers were willing to accept support from the Chinese. Through the partnership, the American researchers were hoping to advance work on a less complex reactor, in which molten salt would be used as a coolant rather than a fuel line. “The budget is what the budget is,” David Holcomb, Oak Ridge’s principal investigator for the agreement, explained during a conference appearance at the time.

Ten years later, the armature of assumptions and policies that enabled such a partnership has been blown apart. After Donald Trump won the 2016 Presidential election, the Department of Energy severed ties with SINAP and threatened to revoke licenses from American companies that exported nuclear technology to China. During Trump’s second term, the Administration’s hostility toward China has only increased. “If you write about the coöperative research agreement, the new Administration will fire everyone for being evil collaborators,” a senior figure at a U.S. nuclear company told me. He was only half joking. When I requested information about molten-salt research at Oak Ridge, the media-relations manager there told me “we won’t be able to help you this time,” and later minimized the extent of the facility’s coöperation with SINAP. After a brief back-and-forth with Idaho National Laboratory and Los Alamos about interview requests for David Holcomb, who has since moved to the private sector, and for Thomas Mason, who had been the head of Oak Ridge during its partnership with SINAP, both laboratories stopped responding to my messages. This reticence stands in contrast to the atmosphere a few years ago, when Holcomb gave multiple interviews to the press, and Oak Ridge allowed tours of the facility that had originally housed its molten-salt reactor.

My two e-mails to Xu Hongjie similarly went unanswered. Then, in November, Xu passed away, reportedly dying while at work at his desk.

The days of “common interest” and “open science,” invoked by Holcomb in 2015, have given way to new mantras of “geostrategic influence” and “national security.” These talking points, which have been embraced by Republicans and Democrats alike, call on nationalism to reboot an industry withered by decades of retrenchment. It remains to be seen if this is enough to make the U.S. nuclear industry competitive in international markets, or even profitable domestically.

To make sense of what is happening in nuclear energy today, it helps to know about what was once called “the first nuclear era”—a thirty-seven-year stretch between 1942, when Enrico Fermi oversaw the first controlled fission chain reaction, and 1979, when the second reactor at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, in southeastern Pennsylvania, partially melted down. At the height of this period, around 1960, the United States accounted for almost seventy per cent of global spending on R. & D. Nuclear energy, which sat at the nexus of defense and civil engineering, was a double beneficiary. From these investments came a series of ever more terrifying weapons alongside a fleet of experimental and commercial reactors that made the U.S. the world’s largest producer of nuclear energy. America still holds this title, but China is poised to assume the mantle, probably sometime around 2030.

The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment epitomized the possibilities of this period. The concept originated in the late nineteen-forties, with a request from the Air Force to develop a nuclear-powered airplane. Alvin Weinberg, who later became the director of research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, didn’t think that such an aircraft would fly, but he was willing to try to build one. He had helped develop the reactors that produced plutonium for the Manhattan Project and moved to East Tennessee, after the war. There, he presided over the development of O.R.N.L., which grew from a plutonium-production facility near the Clinch River. For Weinberg, the purpose of a national lab was to try “things too difficult or too risky for private industry to undertake.” An airplane that burned uranium was precisely that.

Weinberg wrote that the reactor would need to reach temperatures around fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit in order to power a jet engine. His team surmised that such heat would mangle any fuel rods small enough to install into an aircraft, so they decided to use fluoride salts. These melted into a liquid at around four hundred degrees Celsius and stayed stable above sixteen hundred degrees. With uranium fluoride mixed in, the molten salt itself could function as fuel.

The system went critical in November, 1954. In its brief life, it showed some remarkable properties, but the test also revealed some of the challenges of working with molten salt. Leaks were a constant problem, and the radiotoxicity of most of the apparatus made repairs next to impossible. As a stopgap, Weinberg’s team had to repeatedly off-gas the reactor compartment, bathing a nearby forest in radioactive xenon and iodine. At the hundred-hour mark, the project was shut down.

The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment gave him another shot. By then, the Atomic Energy Commission was ready to make major investments in order to develop breeder reactors, or reactors that produce more fissile material than they burn. Breeder reactors promised energy on a scale far beyond what could be provided by the global supply of coal and oil, fuels that were projected to become scarce within a century and which were already suspected of warming the Earth. Planning began in 1960, and five years later Weinberg’s team loaded sixty-nine kilograms of enriched uranium into the salt. This time, the experiment was a success. The M.S.R.E. logged over thirteen thousand operational hours, during which the researchers ran countless tests. “​​They did, like, every calculation you could have done at the time to understand how you would build and run and fuel this reactor,” Katy Huff, the Assistant Secretary of Nuclear Energy under President Joe Biden, said. The most important finding was a simple one: the M.S.R.E. proved that a molten-salt reactor was viable.

Weinberg had hoped to move from the M.S.R.E. to a molten-salt breeder reactor. But in 1973 President Richard Nixon pulled federal funding for molten-salt research in order to go all-in on a competing breeder reactor that was cooled with sodium. In 1983, the sodium breeder, in turn, lost its funding. Plagued by budget overages, the project also fell victim to a conservative revolt, spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation. By then, the public had also soured on nuclear-energy projects, owing to the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, in 1979.

There are various ways to index the downturn of the U.S. nuclear industry, but the starkest is probably by permits. From 1954 to 1978, regulators issued a hundred and thirty-three construction permits for civilian nuclear reactors. Between 1979 and 2012, they issued none. “There’s been almost no real work on nuclear power since the seventies,” Nathan Myhrvold, who sits on the board of TerraPower, a nuclear-technology company that he co-founded with Bill Gates, told me. “The Department of Energy still had some research programs going, and I don’t want to slight anyone who was in one of those things. But they stopped building plants. When you stop building plants, it makes it very hard for companies to justify the enormous number of engineers it takes.”

“The thing that struck me the first time we went to China, in particular, is they assigned an awful lot of people to the problem,” Charles Forsberg, a research scientist at M.I.T., told me. “And if you assign several hundred engineers to the problem you will learn very, very rapidly.” Forsberg spent his early career as a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory before moving to M.I.T., where he is overseeing the construction of a molten-salt loop that will run along the side of the campus’s research reactor. He is also one of three engineers who, in 2002, hashed out the concept for a fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor, or F.H.R. That involved taking Weinberg’s molten-salt reactor and swapping the liquid-fuel loop for a more conventional core design, while still using molten salt as a coolant. This change simplified the most vexing problems, of corrosion and containment, while preserving the high process heat that molten salt makes possible. The F.H.R. has played a significant role in rekindling interest in molten salt for fission reactors in the United States—which is the reason that Forsberg initially travelled to China to meet with the SINAP team.

Forsberg’s travel, and the relationship that he developed with Xu Hongjie and other researchers at SINAP, took place at the outset of a relatively recent period of collaboration between the U.S. and China. The partnership was formed under the framework of a 2011 “memorandum of understanding” between the Department of Energy and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which provided for coöperation on nuclear technologies. That agreement was based on a previous agreement, from 2006, which had cleared the way for U.S. nuclear firms to sell reactors to China. Both stemmed from the desire of each country to leverage the other to revamp its own nuclear industry.

China had only a handful of reactors in the early two-thousands, but in 2007 its planners had vowed to massively increase nuclear-energy production by 2020. That meant building something like forty new reactors in about fifteen years—a pace and scale only matched by the U.S. nuclear industry in the twentieth century. To meet that goal, China intended to buy the first fleet of new reactors from foreign companies, under contracts that required significant technology transfer. Although this now looks like a mixed bargain, at the time, the U.S. nuclear industry was only too happy to take it. The industry had just weathered a quarter century of effectively zero domestic demand for new reactors, and had hundreds of experts unable to put their skills to use. These were “a bunch of old Navy nuke guys, or guys that studied nuclear engineering forty years ago, who knew a ton about aging management and cracking piping and corroding pumps and things like that,” David Fishman, then a partner at a boutique China-based nuclear consultancy, told me. “They were just so pleased to come over and find a young, eager market and industry that was planning to build dozens of reactors.”

U.S.-China coöperation on molten-salt research proceeded under conditions not so different from the commercial melee. Forsberg and his collaborators—Per Peterson, a nuclear engineering professor at Berkeley, and Paul Pickard, formerly of Sandia National Laboratories—had pursued their design through academia for years, using oil or water to simulate molten salt, which is expensive and difficult to acquire in the United States. Then, in 2011, they were awarded a major multi-university grant from the Department of Energy which ultimately allowed them to start running tests with the real thing. That became a useful point of connection for Xu and his team, who had recently received a major grant from the Chinese government. The SINAP group was created to build a liquid-fuel reactor, with hopes of eventually fulfilling Weinberg’s vision of making a thorium breeder. To create some common ground with the Americans, they also committed to building a salt-cooled reactor like the F.H.R.—the project that the D.O.E. was most interested in at the time.

A technician prepares salts for use in the M.S.R.E., at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in 1964.Photograph courtesy Oak Ridge National Laboratory

You can see the early dynamic of U.S.-China coöperation play out in a video of SINAP’s first presentation at Berkeley, delivered in August, 2012. As the institute’s representative, SINAP sent Kun Chen, who had done his Ph.D. at Indiana University and was still in his thirties. The audience skewed much older: about two-thirds of them looked to be in their fifties or sixties. The attendees tried to suss out the practicality of SINAP’s ambitious plan. One man asked about the budget, which was about three hundred and fifty million dollars, spread over five years. Another man asked where SINAP planned to get molten salt, since “to my understanding, there are no facilities in the world that can produce” it. Chen replied that China had several facilities that could.

It’s hard to tell from the video what the Chinese side got out of these exchanges, but when I spoke with Chen he stressed how helpful it was to have interlocutors in the U.S. “From the start, we didn’t believe we could get this far,” he said. Molten salt was no less niche in China than it was anywhere else. Chen estimated that, back in 2011, there were only thirty or forty people in the whole world working seriously on using the substance for fission reactors. Connecting with some of those individuals in the U.S. made the project seem possible.

For the Americans, there was the curiosity of seeing how far the Chinese could go with resources that simply didn’t exist here. Coöperating with SINAP was also a way to prod the U.S. federal government. The logic was “If the Chinese are doing it, it must be relevant,” Forsberg said.

In that sense, the coöperative research-and-development agreement that Oak Ridge signed with SINAP cut out the middleman. To fund the molten-salt loop, SINAP paid Oak Ridge around four million dollars, according to Chen. With such a loop, researchers could test materials and all the plumbing components needed to circulate molten salt. The project also gave a focal point to people working on molten salt in the U.S. Speaking to a reporter from the MIT Technology Review, David Holcomb explained his motivations. “One of the important things to realize is that a number of key people in molten-salt reactors are retiring very fast or passing away,” he said. “China is providing the funding that allows us to transfer that knowledge, to gain practical experience at building and operating these reactors.”

That article ran in August, 2016. By 2018, the U.S. had withdrawn from almost all coöperation with China. “I wouldn’t say it’s a total surprise,” Chen told me. He and the SINAP team figured that the relationship would probably deteriorate under Trump. “But it was just happening very suddenly. It’s similar to what we have learned in the tariff issue.”

I asked Chen if he ran into any challenges once his team was going it alone. “The challenges are, I think, mostly, first of all, if you have the money,” he said. But the SINAP team certainly had that. The Chinese Academy of Sciences had been extending the project’s grant every year. By 2018, China promised three billion dollars for molten-salt reactors over the next two decades, while Chinese planners have called for a $1.3 trillion investment in nuclear energy as a whole by 2050.

During Chen’s first presentation at Berkeley, in August, 2012, one of the few young people to ask him a question was a man with a shock of dark brown hair and an ample goatee. I had watched the recording several times before I realized the man was Mike Laufer, who would go on to help found Kairos Power, a privately held nuclear company that is attempting to commercialize the fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor originally designed by Forsberg, Pickard, and Peterson, who is also a co-founder of Kairos. Once I recognized Laufer, his question to Chen, about “the biggest challenges or obstacles to overcome” in order to build a salt-cooled reactor, had a new resonance. Was Laufer, who at the time was a graduate student at the university, already putting together a business plan?

Kairos represents a new era for the U.S. nuclear industry. Inspired by SpaceX, it is effectively trying to rebuild U.S. industrial capacity within a single company. The business model calls for a vertically integrated network of facilities that can fabricate fuel and salt for Kairos, and can manufacture a large share of what the company needs to build its reactors. The hope behind all this is that by running things internally Kairos will be able to offer nuclear energy at a competitive price in the market. And it has had some success. Last year, Google committed to buying five hundred megawatts from the firm by 2035. Kairos is also one of only two U.S. companies with a permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a new reactor. Construction of the reactor building, located in Oak Ridge, broke ground last year. “We’re working to get that reactor up and running this decade,” Laufer told me.

In getting to this point, Kairos initially benefitted from U.S. partnership with China on molten-salt research, and is now reaping the rewards of the recent pro-nuclear turn in American domestic industrial policy. The money that China put into U.S. research in the early twenty-tens pushed development of the fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor from theoretical work into practical experimentation, and the salt loop that SINAP paid for at Oak Ridge National Laboratory yielded a report of molten-salt pumps, which dovetailed with one of Kairos’s early priorities. For several years after the Trump Administration ended nuclear coöperation with China, there was little to replace Chinese money in the U.S. nuclear industry. But big public spending eventually started coming, along with growing private investment. In 2020, Kairos was awarded a three-hundred-and-three-million-dollar grant from the Department of Energy, and with other young nuclear companies it benefited tremendously from a thirty-per-cent-investment tax credit for clean energy contained in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill sunsetted credits for solar and wind early, but the Senate ensured that nuclear energy would keep them.

I asked Laufer if he was worried about competing with China. “At the moment, what we’re trying to do is challenging enough,” he said. ♦